The processing of meat, and especially of poultry, has bourgeoned to where over four billion chickens are processed and sold yearly in the United States. The consumption of poultry in the United States has increased to where, for the first time since 1988, it exceeded that of beef. Such increase has been attributed to the recommendation of many medical groups that red meats be substituted with poultry or fish having a relatively lower percentage of saturated fat as a means of reducing overall serum cholesterol levels and attendant risk of heart disease.
Spurred largely by consumer demand, producers of prepared and packaged foods, as well as restaurateurs, have been using more and more poultry, and have required suppliers to deliver products meeting quite stringent size and weight specifications.
A variety of mechanisms have been developed with the purpose of apportioning chicken breasts. For the most part these devices have failed to reliably cut meat portion margins and have failed to accurately accommodate for the inherent orientation memory of muscle fibers. The former separation defect required hand trimming to achieve an acceptable profile, while the later defect resulted in uneven cooking attributes.
In 1995, Smith introduced a controlled volume chicken breast apportioner which exhibited the advantages of carrying out very reliable separation and which functioned to accurately overcome orientation memory to achieve both uniform thickness from portion-to-portion and contribute to improved cooking attributes. Described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,569,070 issued Oct. 29, 1996, the apportioner employs a blade containing an upper cutting head die wherein the blade is combined with a rearwardly disposed compression surface. This upper die cooperates with a sequence of platens each of which incorporates a boundary slot for receiving the die blade and an associated bearing surface configured to engage the compression surfaces. This combination achieves highly reliable severing. The apparatus further incorporates a thickness defining compression component, which both reduces orientation memory and controls the shape of the resultant meat product. The Smith device efficiently prepared chicken breast cutlets from breasts having weights ranging from about 7 ounces to about 28 ounces.
Over the somewhat recent past, chicken producers in the United States have been called upon to grow larger birds which, in turn, provide larger breasts ranging in weight from about 16 to about 24 ounces. To accommodate for these larger sizes, some producers have “horizontally” severed the breasts in half prior to submitting them to apportioning systems. When so severed in half the thinner tapering rearward region of the breast is unavailable for forming primary cutlets, the weight-based value of which is comparatively higher. Correspondingly, a substantial portion of the original breast is consigned to less profitable forms of meats which for the most part, are ground. In contrast the more profitable primary cutlets are configured for bun or plate coverage.